Let’s Browse

Creative Avenues

The Archives

The Fine Print

All opinions expressed on this blog are my own. The photos and layouts shown are my own, unless I have stated otherwise. I choose what to share and review. From time to time, I may use affiliate links to promote products. Please know that I only choose and link things I genuinely love and would buy myself {or already have!}. This blog is a true reflection of me and I appreciate your visit and support!

Windows 10: Love it or Hate it?

Before I began with the idea of building my own PC, I was contemplating an Alienware laptop. I did a little more than contemplate because I actually ordered one and had it in my hands for 2 days. It arrived on my birthday and after some trials of installing my many programs, I found out it was not going to be a good fit for me. Briefly, I will say that I wanted a solid state drive (SSD), so that I could enjoy a faster startup and have my games run at a better speed. My previous Dell Studio XPS was 7 years old and moving very slowly with an Intel Dual Core i5 processor. Even with 16GB of ram added later, a new power supply, and a newer (not the newest or best) graphics card, it was still moving like a snail with my programs. I was never able to play the Sims 3 on it. I could play the Sims 2 at minimal setting, but it still struggled. Sims 4 ran moderately well since changes were made to how the game ran and utilized resources. Still, the Alienware laptop was just not what I had in mind. There was no way 128GB SSD was going to be large enough for all my programs and all of their future updates. Performance would take a hit and much quicker than I wanted. So, I decided that for the same money, I was going to start planning to build the desktop PC of my dreams.

The one thing on the laptop that I enjoyed was Windows 10. Oh, the interface was beautiful. The flat UI was just calling my name. Design was simple, yet functional. So when I started my build on PCPartPicker , I just knew I was going to give Windows 10 a chance. My husband and I had said we were going to wait for the upgrade, especially on our current computers. Everything was compatible. Don’t mess up a good thing. Well, you know me, reading and reading and I see things about DirectX 12 for newer games that won’t be added as an update to 7 and only on Windows 10. Right now, the games I play don’t use DirectX 12, so realistically it should not have been a thought, but I did want a machine that I could have for years.

Here I am, since April 2016, now a Windows 10 user. Also translates to a Windows 10 user with a headache and annoyed highly already. Four months is how long it was before I had to reinstall my Windows. Not a long time at all. Why did I have to reinstall?

First, I played Sims 4 for a couple of hours. Afterwards, I went into Photoshop and even shared some photos without any issues.

Next day, turned the PC on and black screen.

“What??? What the —- is going on?? Why is my computer not coming on??”

Let me just say that I quickly got frustrated. My PC has already had sporadic freezing during use of certain programs (especially Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.5) and that should not be happening at all. I had not allowed any updates on the computer and it had not been restarted. It was exactly how I’d left it before it went to sleep the night before. So, what could it be? I ran some check disks and made sure there were not too many programs were starting up with the computer. I restarted a couple of times and got nowhere. I turned my external drives (EHDs) off and it powered back on no problem.

That was weird! I have at least 2 EHDs (expansion drives) that power on and off with my PC. Never had this issue.

Checked for Windows errors on the drives since I was shutting it down unexpectedly. I had to hold the power button to shut down just so the PC would turn off completely. Then, I finally get it back on and the hard drive with my photos on it started dropping out of Windows Explorer. When I tried to access it, explorer froze and I had to Ctrl + Alt + Delete to get out to the restart selection. I restarted and turned off the one drive and Windows started to drop my other external drive.

Other users were able to create additional PC users and change their admin account and got their taskbar working that way. Didn’t work for me! So, I resorted to do a reset of my pc through W10. This way I could keep all my program folders with their settings. Taskbar still did not work. I was steaming at that point and had a migraine. I tried to create a new user, I tried restarting explorer.exe through the task manager and it had an error about class denied and not valid. More frustrating sighs here.

I walked away to do something else at this point because I was very ready to buy Windows 7 OEM version.

After reinstalling twice all of my programs and changing various settings within Windows, I narrowed down the culprit to a Windows update and possibly my external drive is almost at the end of it’s life (it’s 4 years old). My hubby took my EHD out of the case and placed it in my PC. That way I could be sure it wasn’t something wrong with a connection inside the drive case and it was not. The drive was going bad. My PC was freezing again when trying to access the EHD. I did a clean install of Windows and deleted this update, KB 3176934 , after reading this article my hubby found. I could uninstall the update the way the mentioned in the article though. It could not find the file, but when I went through the control panel and looked at last installed updates… Guess who I saw? Yup! KB 3176937 was installed the night before my troubles began. I deleted it from there and things have been normal since. I also disabled the Windows update service. Not sure if it will help, but it does not hurt to try. I would rather choose to manually install updates after I see no issues from the masses. Oh Microsoft, will you ever change your ways?